Social and Emotional Learning programs, designed to enhance adolescents’ social and emotional skills, are implemented in schools worldwide. One of these programs is Skills4Life (S4L), for students in Dutch secondary education. To strengthen this program and adapt it to students’ needs, we conducted an exploratory study on their perspectives on their own social-emotional development, focusing on low-achieving students in prevocational education. We interviewed eleven boys and eleven girls in five focus groups on (1) their general school life experiences, (2) their perceptions and experiences regarding interactions with peers, the problems they encountered in these interactions, and (3) the strategies and skills they used to solve these problems. Driven by findings in related studies initial thematic analyzes were extended using a three-step approach: an inductive, data-driven process of open coding; axial coding; and selective coding, using the social-emotional skills comprised in an often-used SEL framework as sensitizing concepts. Overall, students were satisfied with their relationships with classmates and teachers and their ability to manage their daily interaction struggles. Their reflections on their interactions indicate that the skills they preferred to use mirror the social-emotional skills taught in many school programs. However, they also indicated that they did not apply these skills in situations they experienced as unsafe and uncontrollable, e.g., bullying and harassment. The insights into adolescents’ social-emotional skills perceptions and the problems they encountered with peers at school presented here can contribute to customizing school-based skills enhancement programs to their needs. Teacher training is required to help teachers gain insight into students’ perspectives and to use this insight to implement SEL programs tailored to their needs.
MULTIFILE
Interactive Virtual Math (IVM) is a visualization tool to support secondary school students’ learning of dynamic functions situations graphs. The logbook-function allows teachers to get continuous and real-time assessment on classroom progress and of individual students’ learning process. In a teaching experiment involving four mathematics teachers and their students, we investigated how the tool was used by the students and by the teachers.
A research into classroom interaction (behaviour and communication) between teachers and pupils in the light of social justice. The research is based on the concern that educational praxis, defined as 'practice which implies a conscious awareness of the practitioners that their actions are morally committed, and oriented by tradition' are, under modern policy pressures in danger of being replaced by a form of practice which amounts simply to following rules.
